To the Lake

19 THE DOCTOR’S STORY

Almost three weeks ago, after they had found out that Moscow and St Petersburg closed down for quarantine, the chief doctor of the hospital where they both had worked was on the phone with Petrozavodsk for a long time, and they heard his irritated voice from behind the door of his office saying ‘no, you tell me what to do!’ and ‘I have five cases in town, and another one coming in from a nearby village with similar symptoms!’, and then threw the receiver down, came out to his staff waiting outside and said gloomily: “So. We need to go to Petrozavodsk.”

Somehow they were all convinced that the vaccine existed – maybe in a small batch, maybe it was experimental, without a proper clinical trial – but they thought it did exist, and for some unknown reason their small town hadn’t received it, maybe because the capitals needed it more than the provinces (which the capitals did not care much about – as was always the case.) It was decided to send an expedition to the department of health’s office, ‘and Nikolai and I were ideal candidates because neither of us have families’, the doctor said, and looking at Ira turned slightly pink. The head of the hospital said to them before they left: ‘Pavel, go and sit in the waiting room and don’t leave until they give you the bloody medicine, do you hear me? And don’t come back without the vaccine.’ Then they drove all night – almost four hundred kilometres on a really bad, frozen road and arrived in Petrozavodsk by the morning of the following day. The department of health really did not care about them, as had been expected, so having waited in the reception area till lunch, the doctor decided to break all possible and impossible rules and just forced his way into the deputy head’s office, interrupting his departmental meeting which had been going on all morning, and spurted out his angry speech which had been going through his head while he sat on the uncomfortable passenger seat on the sleepless journey to Petrozavodsk. But he didn’t quite manage to finish it as an elderly, exhausted man, who sat at the top of the table, with a face as sad as a spaniel’s, shouted at him with unexpected energy: “You said five cases? I’ve had five thousand cases in two weeks! And another five hundred every day! And there’s been no phone connection with St Petersburg, since yesterday! I don’t have a vaccine, nobody does, they’re simply waiting for us all to die, damn it!” – he paused to draw breath, and then said in a calmer voice: “Your main advantage, my dear man, is that you live far away from here, and there aren’t so many of you – trust me, you’re much luckier there than we are here, so take your van and fuck off to where you came from, and start praying, damn you, for your five cases.” The doctor didn’t give up at hearing this, of course, and spent the rest of the day pushing through the narrow corridors of the department, grabbing some random people by the sleeves, eavesdropping on conversations, trying to ring through to somewhere else, explaining something to somebody, and only towards the end of the day did he realise that this exhausted man, who had shouted at him in his office, was absolutely right – the epidemic had got out of control, if there ever had been any control, and whatever was going on was an avalanche-like catastrophe.

The only thing he managed to get hold of was a stamped piece of paper, stating that the producer of that paper, Pavel Krasilnikov, was entitled to receive two thousand doses of an antiviral drug at a Petrozavodsk drug storage. “Only it won’t help you,” somebody told him, “it’s for the flu, but not that kind of flu,” and when he ran outside, clutching the precious piece of paper, it turned out that Nikolai’s car had been ‘borrowed’ for the forced hospitalisation of the infected, and then he had to run to the pharmacy, asking occasional passers-by the way, staring in horror at the empty streets with ambulances on the sides, people with no faces in identical white and green masks, the make-shift points of groceries and medicines distribution with queues of silent, alarmed people – in a word, everything that we all knew too well by then without him telling us.

By the time Nikolai turned up – completely exhausted and scared to death, with his facemask askew – Pavel had already had got his hands on the two thousand doses packed into three small rectangular bags, and despite tiredness and shock they were both willing to go home, to escape the three hundred thousand populated city, which, as they could see, was already in agony; luckily

before they set out on this desperate trip they had filled the tank full of petrol so they just jumped into it and dashed away from the city. Only they didn’t manage to leave so quickly – a few kilometres before the exit from the city they got stuck in a huge traffic jam consisting of cars full of people who, just like Nikolai and Pavel, were scared stiff. There were suitcases and bundles hurriedly fixed on the roofs and stuffed into the boots of the cars and these were poking out, and while Pavel stayed in the car and kept looking back at the carefully stacked bags with the medicine, Nikolai ran ahead and came back with the news that they couldn’t leave the city – the road was blocked by lorries and armed people who weren’t letting anyone out. With great difficulty they turned back through the side streets and tried to leave the city through various other routes but it was the same story everywhere – they had announced quarantine in Petrozavodsk – finally, with a full week’s delay. This desperate measure was taken not to save the doomed city, which was beyond saving, but rather to protect those who were outside the city from the ruthless disease.

They didn’t say much about what they did in a besieged city for three weeks – ‘I told you, he has to meddle in’ Nikolai said with sad pride, and sourced himself another cigarette from Dad’s stocks; they said that they only had to open one of the bags with the medicines which they had got from the empty drugs store – and it was probably that, or maybe some other unexplainable luck, that saved both of them from the disease, despite spending twenty days in close contact with dying people. “You see, it’s a priceless clinical experience,” said the doctor with a lot of emotion, looking each of us in the eyes, as if it was vitally important to him to convince us. “This virus is undoubtedly really dangerous, but it’s not the virus that kills – I am absolutely convinced that an infected person can be saved if the haemorrhagic pneumonia, which starts on day four to six, can be prevented. The incubation period is very short, untypically short – sometimes it’s only a few hours, and twenty-four hours maximum, and this is really bad for a patient, but generally speaking this is good, you see? If the diagnostics were done properly from the very start and the infected had been isolated, a lot of lives could have been saved, but they pretended that nothing was happening to avoid panic, like they always do, and then it was too late!” he finished with despair in his voice.

Then they told us that when the useless checkpoints had been deserted three weeks later, because half of the troops got infected and the other half fled, they both boarded the ambulance van and tried to leave again; they left the city without any trouble, but on the way to Medvezhiegorsk, before they reached Shuya, they came across a crumpled, badly damaged car with a woman inside it whose face was white with horror and her hair all messed up. When she saw the red cross on the van she came out of the car and practically threw herself in front of the ambulance, and when they stopped (‘He just has to meddle in!’ said Nikolai with gloomy satisfaction), it turned out that this woman’s husband was lying in the back of the car with a bullet in his stomach, and while the doctor made desperate but fruitless attempts to save him, the woman stopped sobbing and sat on the ground, wiped out, with her back to the muddy wheel of the car; she told them, interrupting her story with sharp, convulsive gasps, that Shuya, which was on the left side of the motorway, had been plundered and burnt, and straight after Shuya she and her husband were ambushed and had to drive through a line of cars blocking their way. Some people shot them in the back, and one shot cost the car its rear window, and the other – confirmed by Pavel shortly afterwards – cost her husband his life.

They took the woman with them – when she saw her husband was dead, she let them lead her into the van without emotion; she didn’t take a single thing from her mangled car and didn’t say a word during the journey. In the forty minutes they were driving all they heard was the regular knocking of her head on the window every time the van went over a bump – which gave them a scare every time. In the centre of the city she suddenly asked them to pull over and apathetically waved them off in spite of their trying to persuade her to come back and stay with them with promises that they would try to break out of the town together. Instead she slowly walked away; they watched her disappear round the corner of one of the side streets and then decided to come back via a different road, going round Onezhskoye lake, through Vytegra and Nigizhma – no one would dare choose that route in this troublesome time, but the wide Murmansk road was no longer available, and if they did want to get home – three weeks late, and with medicine that couldn’t – they had time to become convinced of it – help anyone, they didn’t have any other choice.

Several times they got into serious trouble – the first time when they got stuck in a dip, similar to the one we had been in earlier and which almost cost us our lives, but their dip was shorter, and that’s how, together, working non-stop for several hours they were able to clear the road. The second time – when, ploughing through the crumbly snow, for some inexplicable reason they had a puncture and it turned out that the spare wheel was no longer there, it had disappeared during the evacuation in Petrozavodsk, and then Nikolai, mightily swearing and freezing to the bones, worked for two hours, which seemed endless, trying to repair it with what he had on hand. He managed to take the frozen tyre off and fix it – they had to pump it up every thirty or forth kilometres, but still it was good enough to carry on their journey. They spent eighteen hours on the road without a break – and all this time Nikolai was driving, ‘I can’t drive, I somehow never got round to learning, you know,’ the doctor said shyly. Wary of potential ambushes they didn’t risk asking to stay for the night in any of the villages they went past, but when they saw our cars on the side, they decided to stop, ‘you see, I saw this little boy,’ the doctor pointed at Anton, clinging to Ira’s leg; ‘Nikolai was really against us stopping – especially now, when we’ve almost reached home, but I thought – you have children with you, maybe you need help,’ and he fell silent and smiled again, as if apologising for the fact that the story was so long.

Everyone was quiet for some time; we were digesting this interrupted account he had just given us.

“Where’s your hospital?” Sergey finally asked.

“In Poudozh, didn’t I say?” they doctor sounded surprised. “It’s not far from here, about fifteen kilometres”.

“Listen,” Marina suddenly said and put her thin hand on the sleeve of the crumpled jacket which Nikolai had draped over the doctor’s shoulders some time in the middle of his speech; several times he huffily lifted it up after it had slid down, when the doctor was waving his arms in a particularly lively fashion, “We’ve heard that there’s unrest in Poudozh. You shouldn’t go there on your own, wait for us, we’ll just top up the fuel and go with you, ok?”

“Unrest?” the doctor asked with a sad smile. “Where is there a place without unrest?”

“Anyway,” said Marina firmly, which I had never noticed in her speech before. “It’s safer to go together, don’t you understand? God only knows what may have happened in Poudozh in three weeks. Just wait a little, we’re almost ready – we are almost ready, aren’t we?”

“No,” Ira suddenly said, “We’re not ready,” and we all looked at her in surprise.

“Ok, we haven’t eaten,” Marina said with energy, “but we can eat on the way, Ira, or now, quickly, it’s going to take ten minutes, they can’t go on their own…”

“This is not the point,” Ira said slowly. “We can’t go because the Vitara has run out of petrol.”

Of course, I was expecting this. The petrol situation was a continuous and ongoing worry: all the time, while we were moving forward, reducing the distance between ourselves and the small house on the lake, which promised us the calm and safety we longed for, I couldn’t help wondering if we had enough petrol to get there. I thought about it while I was driving, watching the thin red needle – it wasn’t moving smoothly, the needle could stay in the same place for an hour or more, and then would make a sudden jump – and every time it did my heart would jump, too, because the car – not just the Vitara but any of our four cars – was keeping us alive on this long dangerous road – indeed our cars had become very symbols of life itself. I had thought about it when we found the abandoned lorry, and then again on the empty petrol stations near Kirillov, and when we were stealing fuel from the cistern. Several times in over ten days we’d been lucky, and the three diesel cars had enough fuel in them to get to the lake: but we hadn’t found petrol anywhere, not counting the several litres Dad found in the summer cottages. I was just not quite ready for the fact that it would happen so quickly and that’s why I asked, and felt very silly asking: “What do you mean – run out? Already?”

“Well, there’s enough for ten or fifteen kilometres”, Ira answered. “But the warning light is on and we thought it’d be better to sort it out here and not in a city where there could be trouble going on…”

“I just didn’t have time to tell you,” Sergey interrupted her quickly, “the Vitara’ll have to stay here. We’ll move all the stuff and we’ll have to make space for ourselves in other cars. It’s ok, we’ve only got about three hundred and fifty kilometres left – we’ll manage somehow,” and continued, addressing the doctor: “Listen – really – why don’t you wait for us? We just need to move our stuff from one car to the other, it won’t take more than half an hour.”

“I’m really sorry,” the doctor answered guiltily, holding his wide hand to the chest, “but we can’t delay any longer. They’ve been waiting for us for three weeks, we just don’t have the right, you see? We’re not taking any vaccine to them, of course, but they need to know… so, thank you, but we’re going to go now.”

“Well, good luck,” Sergey shrugged his shoulders, “all the best.” He stretched his hand out and the doctor shook it with a lot of enthusiasm, and then turned around and started walking towards the hatchback: “Andrey, open up your trailer, we’ll have to move most of the stuff there, I suppose…”

“We won’t be able to fit much in,” Andrey replied, concerned, “We’ve filled it to the brim. Maybe we could get rid of the old petrol cans?”

“Just not all of them, please”, Dad answered, and they all, including Mishka, gathered around the trailer and started arguing, as if the chapter with the encounter on a night road was closed, and the shy doctor and the gloomy, incredulous Nikolai, who had pinched every single cigarette from Dad, hadn’t existed.

“You shouldn’t go on your own,” Marina repeated to the doctor, “half an hour is neither here nor there – it won’t change anything,” but he shook his head vigorously and, with an urgent expression started walking backwards cautiously, as if he was worried that she’d cling on to his arm and wouldn’t let him go, “Oh but wait! It’s late, your chief doctor is probably long asleep…”

“Well that’s not true,” Nikolai butted in hotly, “That one’s definitely not asleep!” and they both exchange understanding glances. “Him? You don’t know the bloke! That one never sleeps! I wish he was asleep, but no, we’ll get in the neck from him for being so late. Come on, Pavel Sergeyevich, say good-bye, and I’ll go and run the engine for a bit.”

Why are they pretending that the place they’re going to still exists, I thought, watching the tall Nikolai busily checking the damaged wheel of the van, seeing whether it could last the fifteen kilometres separating them from the long-awaited Poudozh. In the last twenty-four hours we never saw a single live city, not a single one – only two tiny villages, hidden in the snow, where people were trying to survive by any means and naively believed that twenty odd kilometres of the snowbound road were capable of protecting them both from the illness and from those who hadn’t been affected by it. You saw the same as we did, I thought, so why are you two funny, harmless men in a car on its last legs, acting as if the idea of saving your own lives – the idea we are all obsessed by – never occurred to you?

“Tell me, are you really not afraid?” I said, interrupting Marina’s monologue, and she fell silent, frightened. “Do you really not understand, that there’s most likely no city left there, no chief doctor? Three weeks have gone… you saw for yourselves how quickly… There’s probably nothing left there, maybe a bunch of dying people whom you can’t help anyway.”

The doctor turned to me slowly, and carefully looked at me with a serious face.

“I’m sure you’re wrong,” he answered after a pause, “but even if… I don’t know how to explain. You see, if you’re right, then there’s even more reason for us to be there.”

“Pavel!” Nikolai called in a pleading voice, sitting on the driver’s seat. “We need to go, come on!” And the doctor, nodding to us once again, turned around and walked hurriedly to the van. After struggling with the door for some time, he finally opened it – with what looked like help from Nikolai – but instead of climbing inside, he started shoving his case and jacket into the car and then slapped himself on the forehead and rushed back towards us, accompanied by Nikolai’s angry calls.

“I completely forgot,” he said, when he came up with us, out of breath, “our hospital’s on your way, 69 Pionerskaya street, a two-storey yellow building, you can’t miss it – when you finish, drop by, I can’t guarantee you any luxurious conditions, but I can settle you for the night.” He caught my eye and said in a different tone: “Well, that is if everything’s good there.”

“The best place to spend the night,” Natasha said, while we watched the ambulance van jumping up and down on the bumpy road and finally disappear, “is a hospital full of infection, of course. This doctor must be mad.”

“Because we should never have let him go!” Marina said hotly. “Why were you silent? He’s such a lovely man and the only words you found to say to him were ‘good luck’!” she said, addressing the men, who were busy carrying the luggage from the Vitara, “He’ll die, they’ll both die there!”

“Why is he a ‘lovely man’?” shouted Natasha, “Why? He’s a doctor, yes, is this what it’s about? Is this why you’re so worried about him? You won’t have a personal doctor Marina, sorry. And we didn’t provide you with a personal masseur either.”

“Natasha,” said Ira.

“All right. I’m sorry,” she said reluctantly. “It’s just we don’t have any space for him. We just don’t. OK, let’s go and help the guys with the luggage.”